Stefan saw the Church of Ireland minister, the Reverend Fisher, standing with Father MacGuire; the two men were laughing. From behind they were almost indistinguishable in their black suits and black hats.
Father Carey had been gone for two months now. His bishop had been surprised to receive an abrupt note from him in May to say how concerned he was that pursuing the issue of Tom Gillespie and his Protestant father might cause divisiveness in the community at a level he had not anticipated. He had to question whether the case was good for the Church after all. The note was so unlike the single-minded, bull-headed aggression that had filled the curate’s previous letters that the bishop could hardly believe it was from the same man. Divisiveness was Anthony Carey’s stock-in-trade. He had certainly never shown the slightest regard for the Protestants in his community before. Clearly something had happened. The bishop didn’t know what and didn’t much care. He had been backed into a corner by the turbulent curate and his friends in the Association of Catholic Strength. There was an appetite for putting Protestants in their place that he was a lot less enthusiastic about than some of his younger priests. So it was with considerable relief that the bishop called the Church’s lawyers and told them to find a suitable resting place for the file on Mr Gillespie and his son. He also decided it was high time Father Carey had his own parish. He had no vacancies himself, unfortunately, but he noted that other bishops did. The curate wasn’t missed in Baltinglass. If nothing else it meant the parish priest and the Church of Ireland canon could go back to playing chess with each other on Fridays, as they always did before Father Anthony Carey’s arrival.
At the Pinnacle, on the top of Baltinglass Hill, Adolf Mahr’s voice fought the wind that always blew there, but his presence was more important than what he was there to say. He slipped from English into German and back, even though most of the German children spoke English too. The onlookers liked that. It made the half-heard words feel somehow universal.
‘Prior to the coming of megalithic civilisation, around five thousand years ago, the north and west of Europe was inhabited by isolated and primitive tribes of hunter gatherers. We don’t know how the newcomers came to Ireland, by boat from Iberia or from Britain, but it is their skill with stone that left the first marks of civilisation on our landscape. They still stand on our hillsides today, these tombs and monuments that needed sophisticated organisation, technical expertise and huge resources in manpower. Who were these people? We have no idea. These are their only memorials. We will never know the language they spoke or the gods they worshipped. As they displaced the tribes before them, so they were displaced by the next wave of invaders, who brought bronze and then iron to Ireland. We don’t know whether they were extirpated or enslaved or simply absorbed by the Celts who finally claimed this island for their own. We may feel sadness sometimes, looking at these remains, for they are wonderful things and we should cherish them, but history is unsentimental. It is like nature. It obeys similar natural laws. The strong will survive; the weak will disappear.’
The German Stefan heard wasn’t quite the same as the English. In German it was the strong race that survived and the weak race that disappeared. He didn’t applaud as Adolf Mahr concluded with a few words in Irish to thank the local community for its support. Then, unexpectedly and delightfully for everyone there, with a nod and a smile from Mahr, the German children started to sing. The music was Schubert’s, the words Goethe’s. It had been one of his grandmother’s favourite songs. ‘Über allen Gipfeln is Ruh.’ Over mountain and hill all is still. ‘In allen Wipfeln spürest du kaum einen Hauch.’ Through all the trees scarcely a breeze; in the forest there is no birdsong. Wait, wait, before long you will find peace.
There was more applause, and people moved forward to chat and shake hands all over again. Stefan had had enough. He took Tom’s hand and started to walk away. As he did the Reverend Fisher and the parish priest turned towards him. ‘Marvellous, Stefan, don’t you think?’ said the Church of Ireland minister. There were tears in his eyes. Those young voices had touched something inside him; perhaps it was the memory of his own youth. He lowered his voice. ‘There may be a lot of things we don’t like about Herr Hitler, but my goodness, there are things we could learn.’
Father MacGuire smiled. ‘Probably great craic as long as you don’t want to sing a different tune, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’
Stefan nodded. ‘I’d say so, Father.’
Tom was pulling at his hand. As he looked round he saw that Adolf Mahr was walking towards them, smiling at the priest and the minister. ‘Thank you for coming, gentlemen. It’s quite a climb. But worth it for the view.’ They exchanged a few words about the view and the rain that usually meant there wasn’t one, before the director of the National Museum stretched out his hand to Stefan.
‘Thank you as well, Sergeant.’
Stefan had no option but to shake his hand.
‘There’s no need to thank me, Herr Doktor Mahr.’
The polite but unsmiling look and the oddly correct German unsettled Mahr. It seemed out of place. Something about the policeman was slightly familiar. He looked down at the small boy beside him and smiled warmly.
‘Are you interested in archaeology?’
‘I know it’s where we came from.’
‘It is indeed,’ laughed the director. ‘Good boy!’
He reached out and tousled his hair. Stefan, who was holding Tom’s hand, instinctively pulled him away. It was done without thinking; he didn’t want Mahr touching his son. The German was puzzled. He felt the hostility.
‘Do we know each other, Sergeant?’
‘No, we don’t know each other,’ said Stefan coldly.
As he walked away with Tom, the archaeologist watched him, now more puzzled than before. He paused for a minute, unable to remember why Stefan seemed familiar, then almost immediately he forgot about him and turned back to the queue of people who were waiting to shake his hand.
Stefan and Tom walked east from the Pinnacle, looking at the high, flat top of Keadeen and the Wicklow Mountains beyond. Within minutes the tip of Baltinglass Hill was out of sight behind them. The people were gone. There was only the rough grass and the gorse and the view across the fields towards the farm below Kilranelagh, and a few crotchety, grumbling sheep fanning out in front of them as they walked down the gentle slope.
‘Were they all killed?’ Tom was thinking hard.
‘Who?’
‘The people who lived here once. Who built the stones.’
‘I don’t know. Nobody really knows what happened. I don’t suppose all of them were. I’ve always thought they’re still here in some way.’
‘Like ghosts?’
‘Not like ghosts. I just mean … in us really. Well, we all come from somewhere. But if you keep going back to our grandparents and our great-grandparents and our great-great-grandparents for thousands of years, well, we probably all come from everywhere. Does that make any sense?’
Tom frowned. He wasn’t really sure it did. Stefan smiled.
‘But is this where we belong?’ asked the boy.
‘Well, there isn’t anywhere else, so I’d say so, wouldn’t you?’
Tom nodded. That seemed to make all the sense he needed.
They carried on down the hill. The wind had dropped now and they could feel the warmth of the sun. Tom still held his father’s hand. Hannah’s letter was in Stefan’s mind again. He thought of her last words. ‘There’s not a lot of light. It’s what makes it special. Thank you for giving me some of yours. I won’t forget.’ He wouldn’t forget either. She had given him her light too.
Tom suddenly let go of Stefan’s hand and started to run down the hill, faster and faster, scattering the bleating sheep ahead of him, and sending a pair of larks chirruping up out of the gorse into the clear, evening sky. He was shouting and laughing, just because he wanted to shout and laugh. And as Stefan chased after him, he was laughing as well, and for exactly the same reason.
A
Tale of Two Treaties
The Free State: Ireland in the 1930s
After almost eight hundred years of first Norman, then English invasion and occupation, including the union of Britain and Ireland that had been in place since 1801, the Irish Free State (Saorstat Éireann) was established as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire on 6 December 1922 as a result of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that had ended the War of Independence in 1921. For about one day the Free State comprised the entire island of Ireland, but then six counties in Ulster exercised their right to separate themselves from it, as Northern Ireland, and to remain part of the United Kingdom.
The Treaty’s failure to give Irish Republicans a united Ireland, with no links to Britain, meant that the country was plunged into civil war, with anti-Treaty forces in Sinn Fein and the IRA taking up arms against the Free State despite an election that had approved the new government. The Civil War lasted over a year. It was characterised by great brutality on both sides as men who had fought together against British rule murdered each other. Éamon de Valera, who had been President of the Irish Republic during the War of Independence, became the anti-Treaty political leader. Michael Collins, the most notable pro-Treaty leader, was killed by anti-Treaty forces in 1922.
By 1923 the anti-Treaty forces were beaten. De Valera argued for a truce, but the military leadership disagreed; the IRA dumped its arms, refused to recognise the Free State, and descended into internecine splits and failed bombing campaigns. For ten years the Irish Free State was ruled by the pro-Treaty party, Cumann na nGaedheal (Party of the Gaels). Meanwhile, de Valera had accepted there was no future in armed struggle. He left Sinn Fein and established a new political party, Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny). In 1932 he won a majority of seats in the parliament (Dáil). There was fear that Cumann na nGaedheal would not give up power. It had established a paramilitary wing, the Army Comrades Association, better known as the Blueshirts, modelled on what was happening in Italy and Germany, to defend the party against Fianna Fáil and a resurgent IRA. There was street fighting at political meetings but the ACA was not a serious threat to democracy, and it never really adopted a fascist ideology. Ireland’s democratic instincts and institutions were strong enough, as was the loyalty of its young police force, An Garda Síochána (Guardian of the Peace), and its army. A 1933 march on Dublin, planned by ex-Garda Commissioner Eoin O’Duffy, never happened, though it gave de Valera the opportunity to ban the Blueshirts.
De Valera then adopted the policy Michael Collins had died for: the Free State wasn’t freedom but it was the freedom to achieve freedom. By 1937 he stripped away most of the Treaty elements that tied Ireland to Britain, including references to the English king as King of Ireland. His new constitution claimed the whole island of Ireland, but recognised de facto partition. Incorporated into it was the special position of the Catholic Church; Catholic teaching on women and the family was an important element in the constitution and civil divorce was illegal.
Adolf Mahr came to Ireland from Vienna in 1927, first as Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum, then as its director. His later role as Gauleiter (leader) of the Irish Nazi Party wasn’t unusual in Europe, nor was the activity that went with it – keeping a close eye on anti-Nazi ‘subversives’ and acquiring information that might be beneficial to Germany. In the build-up to the Second World War the Germans got a lot of things wrong as well as right. In Ireland they failed to recognise the complexity of the relationship with Britain. The influence of ‘physical force’ Republicanism was overestimated as was its ability to be a serious terrorist threat to Britain. Antipathy towards England had a familial quality that Germany simply didn’t see. It might make it impossible for Ireland to fight a war at Britain’s side, but it would not translate into a popular will to support Britain’s enemies in such a war. There were those in German intelligence who believed it would.
The Free City: Danzig in the 1930s
The Free City of Danzig (in Polish, Gda´nsk) was two years younger than the Irish Free State. It was established on 15 November 1920, in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles that marked the end of the First World War; as the treaty that laid the foundations for the Second World War it proved even more poisonous than the one that established Saorstat Éireann. It forced Germany to give up territory (in the map above the red line marks the 1919 German border); it demanded crippling reparation payments in the midst of worldwide financial collapse; it mixed nationalism up with hatred and humiliation and despair; and it rolled out a red carpet for Adolf Hitler.
Danzig had been a German city for eight hundred years, though its hinterland contained Polish and German populations. It had always had a tradition of independence, initially as a member of the medieval Hanseatic League of city states; but even as it had shifted back and forward between the kingdoms of Prussia and Poland it had maintained its own traditions and laws. Only in 1871 had it become, for a brief period, part of a united Germany. Now it had independence again, along with a liberal constitution watched over by a League of Nations High Commissioner. But ninety-five per cent of Danzigers spoke German and saw themselves as Germans; as German nationalism became angrier and more vociferous in the financial chaos of the twenties and thirties, more and more Danzigers felt the Treaty of Versailles had penalised them, as it had the rest of Germany. They felt they had been forced into an ‘arranged marriage’ with Poland, a country they believed was occupying ancient German land – and wanted theirs next.
The result was the growth of the Nazi Party in Danzig, mirroring Hitler’s rise in Germany. In 1933 the Nazi Party took control of the Free City. In Ireland democracy offered the freedom to achieve freedom; in Danzig, as in Germany, it was a tool to end freedom. Opposition was repressed and eradicated. The only dissenting voices were the League of Nations High Commissioner and the Catholic Bishop. With appeasement throughout Europe and Nazi policies driving Germany, nothing would stop the Nazi juggernaut, but for a short time Seán Lester and Edward O’Rourke stood their ground.
Seán Lester was League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig from 1934 to 1936, at the height of the Nazi rise to power. Before becoming a diplomat he had been a journalist and a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood; he joined the Irish Free State’s civil service with its establishment in 1922. In Danzig he fought a hard diplomatic battle to hold the Nazi government in check. He had the peculiar honour, during his years as High Commissioner, to be known as ‘the most hated man in Nazi Germany’. After his departure Nazi dominance in the Free City increased and in 1938, despite the presence of the last High Commissioner, an Enabling Act finally abolished all opposition parties and Nuremberg racial policies placed Danzig’s Jewish community utterly outside the law. From that point it was only a question of time until Danzig turned into a trigger for war.
Lester became the last Secretary General of the League of Nations. He sat out the Second World War in an empty Palace of Nations in Geneva, knowing that if Germany won he was on a Nazi death list; as the League of Nations fell apart he had prevented it becoming a tool of German domination in Europe. In 1946 he was the man who handed the vision of peace and cooperation that had been the League of Nations over to the newly formed United Nations. His retirement in Ireland was quiet and uneventful, first in Wicklow, then in Galway. He is one of the twentieth century’s greatest Irishmen, but he is barely known in Ireland. Being too anti-Nazi once carried the taint of being too close to Britain.
Count Edward O’Rourke was appointed Bishop of Danzig in 1922. He was forced to resign in 1937 as a result of increasing conflict with the Nazi authorities, although he was under as much pressure from the Vatican itself, which did not want to antagonise Germany. His successor, Cardinal Carl Maria Splett, a native Danziger, became little more than a puppet of Nazi policy. Edward O’Rourke’s ancestors had fled Ireland after the battle of the Boyne and had subsequently become Russian soldiers and aristocratic landowners. His family lost its estates after the Russian Revolution in 1917. He died in Rome in
1943, having fled Poland when the Germans invaded. Like Seán Lester he was on a Nazi death list. As one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent opponents of Nazism, Edward O’Rourke has also been largely forgotten.
In the streets of Gda´nsk’s old town now you see much of what was there in 1930s Danzig. So successful has the rebuilding been that it is hard to believe it was almost totally destroyed at the end of the war. Its reconstruction was an extraordinary achievement by a Polish nation that lay in ruins everywhere. Yet Gda´nsk is a city of ghosts. The people who originally built it have disappeared from its history.
Acknowledgements
This is a work of fiction, but many books, over many years, have played a part in telling the story, too many now forgotten. But there are a few that should be mentioned: Herbert S. Levine’s Hitler’s Free City; Paul McNamara’s Seán Lester, Poland and the Nazi Takeover of Danzig; Gerry Mullins’ Dublin Nazi No.1: the Life of Adolf Mahr. What I have right I have from them; what is wrong is my own. Seán Lester’s papers in the League of Nations archives have given a sense of who the man was and how he thought that has made me confident about speculation in ways I could not otherwise have been. I could not have written about Dublin’s Clanbrassil Street without Ray Rivlin’s Shalom Ireland, which is a precious document of record of Ireland’s small Jewish community. A very different document, and one that makes for hard reading, is Denis Fahey’s The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World; this book was published in 1935, and it is enough to say that it carried a bishop’s imprimatur at the time. The story Tom listens to on the radio is Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey (1934). Directories of the period have been a special joy: in particular Thom’s Directory of Ireland. Also invaluable was The Irish Times Archive, where I could sometimes find that things I had made up had happened. It is impossible to write about the Free City of Danzig without mentioning the website www.danzig-online.pl. It is an extraordinarily rich collection of documents and photographs for anyone interested in the Free City.
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